One day you realize that you’ve lost your mind.
One day words are lost, and you search for them but there is a hole in your brain where the words used to be.
You struggle to breathe.
I scribbled these words during 2020’s pandemic spring when I realized I had lost the ability to write. Not to physically jot down words. Those came in a profusion that tumbled out everywhere, like raindrops. The issue for me, as we moved into summer, was not being able to focus and write something coherent.
When autumn came, with a second surge of anguish, I dared to whisper a word that was new to me: depression.
Winter promised to be worse. Until one day my fog-addled brain was rescued by something unexpected, a compound known to chemists as C13H16CINO. Also called ketamine, Special K, or just K, the substance took me on a psychedelic journey into the shadow architecture of my mind, exposing those parts made tender by trauma and by a spiky virus that stole so many lives, brains, lungs—and words.
As a science writer and a skeptic, I have long dismissed claims of miracle cures. But if my experience with ketamine is any indication, empirical truth is all relative when a breakthrough helps rescue a nonbeliever like me from a slow slide into oblivion.
This isn’t a story about C13H16CINO, not fundamentally. It’s about what happens when a writer loses his power to assemble words. For eons, artists have complained about the capriciousness of creativity, how a muse or a spark can appear or disappear in a flash. At times I had felt my own creativity ebb and flow, sometimes soaring, sometimes crashing; but over the years I had learned to soldier on to find the words I needed.
Then came COVID.
I was hardly alone in feeling like the bottom was falling out as 2020 passed by grimly, day after day. That February, before the world fully understood what was happening, a close friend got flu-like symptoms. After spending time with her, I got the sniffles. This was in New York, where the virus was then spreading, insidious and largely undetected. By March and April infectious horrors bordering on the medieval had blanketed the globe.
Did my friend and I have COVID or just common colds? We will never know. The country had been so unprepared for the onslaught that there were not enough tests until well into the summer. But even if the coronavirus hadn’t rudely hijacked my cells, there was plenty to freak out about. People were dying after buying tangerines and granola at the corner deli. Politics was careening out of control. Black Lives Matter protesters took to the streets after police were repeatedly caught on camera killing unarmed African Americans. Cities were boarding up shop windows. Daily briefings by a misbegotten president and members of his administration seemed off-kilter, wrongheaded, and dangerous. Apocalypse, for a time, seemed to be looming.
In that dark space between furtive sleep and wakefulness you start falling, falling, falling, and there’s nothing there to stop you.
Most mornings, after emerging from my tangled sheets, I drank a mug of dark-roast coffee, ate a banana, and sat in front of my laptop. I was working on a novel, a biomedical thriller set in the near future about the first human—I named her Rachel—to get extensive neuro-implants that give her extraordinary and troubling powers. Before COVID, her story had spilled out of me. Now the words slowed to a trickle. My anxieties surged: Was it possible I would never be able to write again?
On occasion, I was able to rally. I wrote short pieces for Vanity Fair on issues related to COVID. It was a subject I could relate to, although I remained uncertain about what was going on inside me. That said, the stories I wrote made sense and were even widely read. But I was straining as I hammered out my copy, handing in prose that was at times disjointed. Longer articles and the novel, as well as a nonfiction book that I was supposed to be finishing, came out largely stilted. When I wasn’t writing short, assigned pieces on a fixed topic, I mostly wrote blather.